Tampa Hard Rock hotel-casino booked for RNC convention

Someone within the Republican Party has booked the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Tampa for the duration of the party’s national convention in the Florida city in late August, the Tampa Tribune reported Monday.

Exactly who made the reservation is a mystery. Officials with the hotel-casino have confirmed that someone within the GOP organization — though they won’t say who — has made an unofficial reservation for the entire 250-room hotel for the week of the convention.

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The Republican National Committee’s Committee on Arrangements, which is in charge of securing hotel space for delegates, says it wasn’t them but that any other Republican group is free to make their own accommodations, the newspaper reported.

The Tampa Bay Host Committee, the nonprofit local group involved in convention planning, also told the paper it wasn’t involved in reserving the hotel.

The hotel and casino, which is on property owned by the Seminole Tribe of Florida on Tampa’s eastern edge, recently underwent a $75 million expansion to make it the sixth-largest gambling complex in the world by some measures. The complex, which features 190,000 square-feet of gaming space, includes more than 5,000 slots and is visited by about 20,000 people a day, the casino says.